Ivan Reitman
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The Way Way Back (2013)
Directed by Nat Faxon
influenced by Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981)
Characters
Owen is like a funky update of the Bill Murray character in “Meatballs,” a manic mentor who teaches the troubled protagonist that it just doesn’t matter.
Channeling Bill Murray from “Meatballs,” Owen is the kind of guy that everyone wants to be around, and it’s easy to see why thanks to Rockwell’s immensely charming and hilarious performance.
Wheeling up to a water park, he comes under the wing of the manager, a breezy, don’t-give-a-damn lifer named Owen (Sam Rockwell, channeling the motormouth Bill Murray of “Meatballs”).
Faxon & Rash said their inspiration for Rockwell’s character was Bill Murray in Meatballs, but in Rockwell, at the risk of blasphemy, dare I say they’ve found something even better.
Seeking escape, Duncan ends up hanging around the nearby Water Wizz water park, where he’s adopted by wisecracking man-child manager Owen ( Sam Rockwell , echoing Bill Murray in Meatballs) and his long-suffering girlfriend ( Maya Rudolph ).
Think Bill Murray in Meatballs.
The two friends' initial foray is to re-create "Ghostbusters," and there isn't a laugh in the whole sequence.
Since there’s no way to quickly locate a VHS replacement copy of Ghostbusters for Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), a customer who threatens to tell Fletcher that Mike and Jerry are ruining the store, the duo set out to recreate the film on their own with a camcorder and a lot of low-tech ingenuity.
When loyal customer Ms. Kimberly, tasked by Mr. Fletcher to check in on the store while he's away, comes in to rent Ghostbusters, Jerry and Mike's solution to the crisis is hardly logical, but certainly inspired: Produce and shoot a replacement version of the film within 24 hours so she'll be none the wiser about the store's ruined inventory.
Desperately seeking to assuage lovely but demanding customers like Farrow's Miss Falewicz, Jerry and Mike go about creating homemade remakes of the likes of Ghostbusters, Men in Black, and many more.
This is okay by the locals, including dotty Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), who is only just now getting around to seeing Ghostbusters.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Directed by Jason Reitman
influenced by Ghostbusters (1984)
Themes Plot
A swerve into franchise material would feel weirder if he wasn’t the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters movies and produced this one; the family theme permeates the entire film, which follows a single mom named Callie (played by Carrie Coon), who is the estranged daughter of one of the original Ghostbusters, Egon Spengler (the late Harold Ramis).
I thought about that photo a lot during Ghostbusters: Afterlife , which is an homage to and continuation of the 1984 Ghostbusters that painstakingly mines that movie for props, lines, and characters while giving no indication of being aware of what it was like to actually watch.
Jason Reitman pays tribute to his father’s iconic 1984 film, and its subsequent sequel, with Ghostbusters: Afterlife , a loving and fond continuation of the Ghostbusters legacy.
The film’s main appeal is not what it appropriates from other Ghostbusters pictures, but that it’s a nostalgic nod to the Spielbergian family adventures of the same period.
And yet with its focus on teenage heirs to that legacy, the movie simultaneously feels as much like the Disney Channel version of "Ghostbusters" as a long-delayed sequel.
Too much of the new Ghostbusters is concerned with paying homage to the first movie, from the use of Ray Parker Jr.’s theme song to the incorporation of the Ghostbusters logo into the plot (the logo comes to life as an evil spirit).
“Ghostbusters” gets off to a good start, seemingly going its own way and not copying the 1984 movie.
You can draw plenty of parallels between this new Ghostbusters and the 1984 original.
After months of negative online buzz, director Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters remake emerges as a consistently funny pleasure, never quite as sharp or inspired as the 1984 original, but radiating such good cheer that comparisons between the two films don’t much matter.
No “Ghostbusters” is an island, and stacked against the charming 1984 original, the 2016 effort becomes a pale, unnecessary echo.
“Ghostbusters” is back, with its impossibly jaunty theme song bouncing away in my head again like it’s 1984.
The film, with a first credited feature script by Scott Rothman & Rajiv Joseph, plays a lot like "Moneyball" for football had that film tossed all the statistical machinations for old school gut.
Much like "Moneyball" did for baseball, "Draft Day" exposes the harsh realities and competitiveness of another major league sport.
Unfortunately, the chess references are the most subtle and smartest parts of "Draft Day," a wildly miscast, flaccidly directed, disappointingly dumbed-down drama that reminds us of the phenomenal greatness of Bennett Miller's 2011 release "Moneyball."
Director Ivan Reitman (2011's " No Strings Attached ") and writers Scott Rothman and Rajiv Joseph aren't always entirely eloquent in their approach to the material, but they are knowledgeable, crafting a behind-the-scenes look at the strategic politics of professional sports that could work as an apropos companion piece to 2011's " Moneyball ."
While it does mirror those follow-your-heart narratives employed by many sports flicks such as “Moneyball” and “Field of Dreams,” “Draft Day” demonstrates that shrewd business savvy trumps conviction and passion for the game.
With such a situation, there is the potential for a film to tell a suspenseful story of trying to get the best players for a team that’s desperate to get back on their feet, something along the lines of the recent and great sports film “Moneyball,” a film that showed us that the best sports films are about something beyond the game.
Directed by brothers Adam and Aaron Nee, who collaborated on the script with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, "The Lost City" owes its most direct debt to "Romancing the Stone" but recalls any number of romantic pairings in exotic locales, a la "Six Days, Seven Nights."
Their modern sense of humor goes down way easier than Bullock and Tatum retreading 1998’s miserable “Six Days Seven Nights” with whiny Anne Heche and Harrison Ford.
We’ve seen all varieties of attempts to recreate it since its blockbuster release, from Lewis Teague’s 1985 sequel The Jewel of the Nile , to Ivan Reitman's Six Days Seven Nights , to Jaume Collet-Serra’s Jungle Cruise (which, you’ll remember, just hit theaters last year).
Two big stars, lush greenery, cascading waterfalls: if you've seen "Romancing the Stone," "Six Days Seven Nights" or any number of jungle-set romantic comedy adventures, you already know the drill with "The Lost City."
“The Lost City” is completely harmless as it attempts to revisit past-generation romantic comedy/action adventures such as the aforementioned “Stone,” “Six Days, Seven Nights,” “King Solomon’s Mines,” “The Mummy” and of course “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” but it’s so cartoonishly over the top that it bears no resemblance to anything that could ever happen in the real world.
However, other such attempts like Fool's Gold or Six Days Seven Nights failed much harder, so "good enough" might be enough for The Lost City.
Sadly, "The Watch" never quite matches up with the comedic perfection of "Ghostbusters" in spite of clearly modeling itself after the Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd classic.
Such is the crippling identity problem of The Watch, a movie that desperately wants to be Ghostbusters -- where funny actors confront supernatural happenings -- but doesn’t understand what made Ivan Reitman’s classic tick.
There are times during "The Watch"?solitary moments, but moments just the same?when the film feels as if it's edging reverently into blissful sci-fi/comedy territory previously occupied by 1984's one-two punch of "Ghostbusters" and "Gremlins."
The script, by Jared Stern and frequent writing partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, follows the Ghostbusters template closely, but they don't have anyone of Bill Murray's caliber to punch up the jokes.
Director Ivan Reitman tried to repeat the trick twice, with Ghostbusters 2 and Evolution , only to fall flat both times, and among other imitators, only Men In Black has struck a similarly effective balance.
If this plot, concocted by Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer and Gregory Poirier, sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because they borrowed liberally from “The Pacifier” (2005), in which Vin Diesel played an undercover agent caring for five kids, along with bits from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Kindergarten Cop.”
‘The Spy Next Door’’ may be a Z-movie rip-off of “The Pacifier,’’ which was a B-movie rip-off of “Kindergarten Cop,’’ which wasn’t a grade-A idea to start with, but at the new movie’s center is a notion that’s charmingly, if not dementedly democratic: That a nerdy businessman/undercover super-agent played by action star Jackie Chan could build a loving, sustainable relationship with the suburban single mom next door played by supermodel Amber Valletta.
And when our anti-heroes storm the abandoned city to take down the Enchantress, Ayers reveals that he apparently managed to break into Ivan Reitman's shed and steal his awesome "Ghostbusters" special effects.
Taking a cue from its title, "Suicide Squad" self-destructs in a furiously frenzied, freakishly flat action film with an ending so reminiscent of "Ghostbusters" that Columbia Pictures should sue.
If the movie begins with a hardcore action premise along the lines of Escape From New York, it ends up resembling Ghostbusters, and that stuff falls out of Ayer’s wheelhouse.
And even when the team members are hustled into the field, their first assignment turns out to be a small-scale Escape From New York-style extraction that involves completely ignoring the monumental, world-threatening Ghostbusters-style supernatural event going on in the background.
Ayer is clearly a big fan of The Dirty Dozen, Escape From New York and Ghostbusters, which sounds like a fun mix, but once the first couple of solid action set-pieces are done and dusted, the film’s engine dies.
Without getting into details, the first glimpse of it inspires a huge laugh, not unlike the one you might have heard back in the day upon the arrival of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in the original “Ghostbusters” (1984), but Gunn then decides to stick with it long after it has been milked for all of its initial inherent amusement without introducing anything new or fresh to the proceedings.
With a gentle, affectionate mocking, director Gary Ross (making his directorial debut after writing Big and Dave) lampoons the quaintness of such TV programs by rigorously building a model that adheres to the formula, then slowly pulling it down over the course of two hours.
As he did with Big and Dave, writer and director Gary Ross uses comedy to deal with the value conflicts which continue to divide Americans.
Ross wrote the screenplays for "Big" and "Dave," which were long on warmth and short on complexity and, by that measure…
Written and directed by Gary Ross, who wrote those other delightful fantasies Big and Dave, Pleasantville is like a flip slide to The Truman Show , to which it has been vociferously compared.
Pleasantville marks the directorial debut of Ross, though as the much-praised writer of Big and Dave, he knows his way around imaginative fables about switches in identity.
Although the director, Gary Ross, makes his feature debut with this picture, he's the guy who also penned the hit movies, "Big" and "Dave," two films that not only delivered high concept plots in an entertaining fashion, but also added nice layers of dimensional humaneness to them.
Complete with funny voice (never a good sign in a Sandler performance), mullet haircut and love for hard rock classics played on tape cassette, Donnie is the type of character who could easily fit in a 1980s era Meatballs rip-off.
Charlie Day and Burn Gorman inject a good degree of humour into the film as two sparring scientists, who channel the nerdy mania of Ghostbusters -era Rick Moranis and the 'r'-rolling aloofness of classic Kenneth Williams characters respectively.
The bespectacled Day is 2013’s answer to Rick Moranis, with his presence here being much like the nerdy Louis in Ghostbusters.
If Rogen and Goldberg want a hit as big as “Ghostbusters” (another film, along with “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” that this one borrows from), they should remember that the Bill Murray comedy didn’t keep putting the plot on hold for long stretches of improv.
Seth Rogan and friends manage to do what even Ivan Reitman couldn’t do himself: duplicate the comedic formula that made Ghostbusters so irresistible.
Novel in a comic book, certainly, but here's it's just empty window dressing for a concept, style, and presentation that feels like the unholy combination of Dead Heat (1988), Ghost (1990), Ghostbusters (1984), and (dear lord) Cowboys and Aliens.
Even films intended to mirror the actions of male-centric comedies – Bridesmaids toThe Hangover, Ghostbusters 2016 to Ghostbusters 1984, etc – don’t so much enable women to behave like children but rather co-opts their childishness into a form of didactic camaraderie.
From there, it wasn't such a big leap to Arnold and Kindergarten Cop and now, God help us, The Pacifier, a yawn-by-numbers romper-room dud that is nevertheless shrewd enough to tweak its star, Vin Diesel, for becoming a joke in less time than it took him to become an action hero.
It's Kindergarten Cop by way of Three Men and a Baby (with a little Home Alone cartoon violence thrown in for good measure), with Diesel as a military man whose hard nose slowly softens when he is charged with the protection of a fallen comrade's family.
The film�s antecedents are Kindergarten Cop and Mr. Mom, with Shane�s granite machismo (Diesel even looks sort of phallic) yielding to the cockle-warming force of the adorable moppets as he protects them from terrorists and a bullying vice-principal (Brad Garrett).
Vin Diesel's bid to follow in Arnold Schwarzenegger's massive footsteps has reached the Kindergarten Cop stage.
The Pacifier sounds like the worst parts of Mrs. Doubtfire and Kindergarten Cop, yet director Adam Shankman ( Bringing Down the House ) and writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (the guys behind the flop Taxi ) put together an amiable and sometimes amusing movie.
And it's clear from the very beginning of Saturday Night that co-writers Jason Reitman (who also directed) and Gil Kenan (who wrote the last two Ghostbusters movies) were going for the vibe, while peppering in what really happened on the night the first episode of Saturday Night Live aired, as well as other things that happened during that historic first season.
In Saturday Night, Reitman, who also co-wrote with his Ghostbusters collaborator, Gil Kenan, does his best to not make this an ensemble of young actors doing impressions of comedy greats, nor is he trying to create an entirely historically accurate recreation of what actually happened in the 90 minutes leading up to the first SNL episode.
First he co-wrote and directed the wildly pandering Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and co-wrote its followup, Frozen Empire, handing the directorial reins over to his writing partner Gil Kenan.
James, the movie’s hero, wears his shirts buttoned to the top, tie or no, sports nerd glasses, and is surrounded by a nimbus of curly, ungroomed hair that makes him look like a younger, less-nourished version of either Gustav Mahler or Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters (he would likely appreciate either reference).
There are some mild laughs to be had, and more than a few clever in-jokes and gags (loved the barbed reference to 1998's Harrison Ford/Anne Heche bomb "Six Days, Seven Nights"), but mostly "Fanboys" will leave you with a smile across your face for ninety minutes.